“If you’re up for huge crimes, it’s better to be foreign. They’ll think you must be working for a government and they might not execute you.”

“She just better have all the lawyers out, waiting for us, when we get there,” said Russell. “She swore she would.”

“She said we’d never get arrested too, but, here we are, captured and chained.”

Russell was silent for a few seconds, then said, “She’d better come through after we managed to get his private army wiped out.”

“I know,” said Ruiz. “We’re going to have to take turns sleeping so none of these guys finds a way to kill us.”

They sat in the truck and watched the miles rolling behind the truck into the distance. Russell tried to dismiss from his mind the sight of the few survivors sitting around him in the truck, the hollow look of their dirty, unshaven faces, the sweaty smell of their camouflage battle-dress uniforms, the anger and resentment in their eyes.

He turned his mind to Sarah Allersby. He imagined her in one of those immaculate white silk blouses she wore and a black skirt and high heels. She would be standing by the heavy wooden desk in the two-hundred-year-old building with the thick wooden beams and the big ceiling fans. She would have her golden hair in a tight ponytail, with every strand in place, so it looked like something rarer than hair. She would be holding one diamond earring in her free hand while she clamped the phone to her ear with the other. She would be bringing every bit of her wealth, influence, and reputation to bear on the problem of freeing him and Ruiz. She would say something ridiculous that the government official she was speaking to would want to believe. Russell and Ruiz were just innocent American employees of hers who had gone to the Estancia Guerrero and gotten lost. She would ensure that there were no unpleasant repercussions following their release by flying them out of the country immediately in her private jet. And she would be very grateful to send them away.

GUATEMALA CITY

At that moment, Sarah Allersby was in the master bedroom of the big Guerrero house. She was wearing a white silk blouse, a pair of black slacks, and a tailored black jacket. She chose a pair of pearl earrings and a pearl choker because she’d be dealing with British Customs. Anyone whose job it was to assess the value of jewelry at a glance would recognize a strand like this—round, silvery white, sixteen-millimeter natural pearls with exceptional luster. They had been found by divers in the Arabian Sea in the fourteenth century. And, for once, the source of a priceless piece wasn’t the fruit of her father’s ancestors’ looting of India. The pearls had belonged to her mother’s family. Her father had bought the earrings in Paris forty years ago.